Modernist

The political transition of 1994 foregrounded the debate about who we are and what sites, memories or artefacts actually constitute our common heritage as South Africans. This occasional paper discusses the key outcomes from this debate, as well as the limitations in the current structures that prevent other benefits from being realised.

From architecture to animation, film to photography, the vital
role of lighting is understood across a whole spectrum of
creative disciplines. The modernist architect Le Corbusier
poetically summed up the considerable role it plays in his quote, above. Though speaking specifically about architecture, his words express succinctly just why lighting is so important in the world of 3D. Equally, he speaks for those working across the full spectrum of visual arts.

This collection of essays seeks to explore the vernacular dialogues and contested identities that shaped a complex cultural and architectural phenomenon like Mediterranean modernism. The authors bring to light the debt twentieth­century modernist architects owe to the vernacular building traditions of the Mediterranean region, a geographical area that touches three continents – Europe, Africa and Asia. This book is subdivided into two sections of essays by an international group of scholars who adopt a number of different methodological perspectives.

Martin J Murray is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York in Binghamton. He is the author of numerous books, including The development of capitalism in colonial Indochina (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1980), South Africa: time of agony, time of destiny (London and New York: Verso 1987), and Revolution deferred: the painful birth of post-apartheid South Africa (London and New York: Verso 1995).

Urban design is a diffuse and abstract term. It means different things to
different people. For those not directly involved in its practice or aware of
its effects on their daily lives, it may not mean much, if anything at all. I first
heard the term in architecture school, but I didn’t really think much about
what it might mean until my schoolmate Jonathan Barnett started using it
to describe his aspiration to put together with some of his colleagues a
design capability in the New York City government.

Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant. There was scant opportunity for a musical career in Russia at that time, and no system of public music education. When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from where he graduated in 1865. The formal Western-oriented teaching he received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five, with whom his...

Born amidst the furious social changes of the mid-1960s, postmodern architecture redefined the purposes of a prestigious profession. In this work, Magali Sarfatti Larson gives a bold and comprehensive account of the social, economic, and ideological shifts that cracked the modernist dogma and reintroduced historical allusion, diversity, and ornament into architectural discourse and practice.

A seminal idea proposed in The Intimate Enemy
which has subsequently come rather to define Nandy's
(frequently mis-represented) public political stance
concerns the disjunctions imposed by colonialism which
have returned to haunt contemporary India. The pen-
etration of the West has created a class of mimic men,
"modernists, whose attempts to identify with the colo-
nial aggressors has produced...pathetic copies
of...

Given these ideological premises it is no surprise that the avant-garde film-
makers mentioned above were deeply involved in establishing a modernist
tradition of advertisement that relied on purely or at least heavily abstracted
patterns. From the early 1910s the German film producer Julius Pinschewer
sought to establish new forms of expression in advertisement and succeeded
in collaborating with some of the most innovative film technicians and film-
makers.

As for formal features, in recent advertisements abstraction is found not as a
flat composition of graphical or animated elements, but as a reduction of pho-
tographic images to a painterly arrangement of light and colour. However, the
arrangement of the visuals based on music harks back to the concept of rhythm
so central in the modernist avant-garde.

Hybr idity and Connect ivity br ing act ivit ies and people together, rather than
isolate objects and separate functions. These qualities also treat people and nature
as symbiot ic—as well as buildings and landscape—rather than opposit ional.
Porosity preserves the integr ity of that which is brought together while allowing
mutual access through permeable membranes, rather than the modernist at tempt
to dismantle boundaries or postmodernist fortiication.

Andrew Sayer undertakes a fundamental critique of social science’s difficulties
in acknowledging that people’s relation to the world is one of
concern. As sentient beings, capable of flourishing and suffering, and
particularly vulnerable to how others treat us, our view of the world is
substantially evaluative.

Terminal 2 was opened in 1960. Once again, the architect firm
responsible was Vilhelm Lauritzen AS. Its simple layout as a large,
centre-less space with inserted and replaceable floor slabs was
designed to make it possible to carry out later conversions and
extensions without bringing the terminal to a halt. In 1987,
Vilhelm Lauritzen AS completed an extension of Terminal 2 with a
large new shopping centre. The terminal has subsequently been
converted and extended several times (see pages 16 and 24).

In July 1923, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos arrived in Paris as a complete unknown.
Some five years had passed since his first large-scale concert in Brazil; Villa-Lobos journeyed to
Europe with the intention of publicizing his musical output.
His entry into the Parisian art world took place through the group of Brazilian modernist painters
and writers he had encountered in 1922, immediately before the Modern Art Week in São Paulo.

His plans would soon be altered, though. A second concert promoted by Dona Laurinda attracted the
attention of the São Paulo modernist artists; in it, Villa-Lobos presented his most aesthetically
‘daring’ works, such as the Quartetto Simbolico and the piece A Fiandeira for solo piano, clearly
inspired by Debussy’s music. Villa-Lobos’s ‘modernity’ – a Debussian ‘modernity’ – meant he was
the only composer invited to present his works at the São Paulo Modern Art Week.

This report considers the origin, development, and functions of selected non-U.S. intelligence organizations, assessing their role in terrorism threat mitigation, their relationship with law enforcement agencies, and the means and modalities by which they are controlled and monitored. The anal